ARTE NO ES VIDA: ACTIONS BY ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAS, 1960-2000 Landmark Exhibition at El Museo del Barrio Highlights Performative Actions by Over 75 Latino / Latin American Artists
January 30 - May 18, 2008
NEW YORK, NY - January 17, 2008 - El Museo del Barrio, New York's premier Latino and Latin American cultural institution, is pleased to announce its groundbreaking exhibition Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960 - 2000, which will be on view from January 30 through May 18, 2008. "Arte No Es vida" surveys, for the first time ever, the vast array of performative actions created over the last half century by Latino artists in the United States and by artists working in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America. Curated by Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, Arte No Es Vida is the recipient of a prestigious 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.
Through a rich and lively presentation of photographs, video, texts, ephemera, props, and artworks that reference canonical works, the exhibition represents a landmark within the documentation of action art. Arte No Es Vida expands standard descriptions of "performance art," revealing how work created by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American artists is often not only dramatized but politicized. An accompanying exhibition catalogue will serve as the first comprehensive resource publication to address this segment of the field of performative art. "El Museo del Barrio has a great history of conceiving and presenting exhibitions that advance deeper understanding of Caribbean and Latin American art and culture," says Julian Zugazagoitia, Director of El Museo del Barrio. "This project furthers our mission by bringing the Latin American contributions within performative art to a larger audience, and within a historical context, it is particularly resonant for us as it includes the work of El Museo's founding director, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, a leading action artist well before the museum's founding in 1969."
Many of the works included in Arte No Es Vida have subtle or overt political contexts and content: military dictatorships, civil wars, disappearances, invasions, brutality, censorship, civil rights struggles, immigration issues, discrimination, and economic woes have troubled the artists' homelands continuously over the past four decades and therefore have infiltrated their consciousness. According to curator Deborah Cullen, "the exhibition title challenges the commonplace idea that art is equivalent to life, and life is art. What is proposed through these many works is that while art affirms and celebrates life with a regenerative force, and sharpens and provokes our critical senses, artistic actions which address inequalities and conflict are not equivalent to real life endured under actual repression."